It’s hardly a surprise that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes declared on Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2013, that Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy. Nobody could possibly be surprised by this. We’ve known for a long time that the city is flat broke and has no way of paying its bills just to stay afloat, let alone repay the legions of creditors that have been pounding on the doors for years. Bankruptcy was pretty much inevitable.

But it is the way in which this bankruptcy came about that was unforgivable and which is likely to have extremely damaging long-term consequences nationwide far beyond the fact that Detroit is the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. Sure, the sheer size of it all will have an effect. But the fact that Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder was permitted to get away with a theft of democracy in broad daylight from the people he was elected to represent is nothing short of a crime. It should have been the city’s elected leaders who made that call. The people we elected to represent us should have been allowed to do exactly that.